Jeremy Vine: Me and my school photo

Broadcast journalist Jeremy Vine, 45, is best known for presenting Panorama, Newsnight and Eggheads, and lives in Chiswick with his wife, Rachel, 33, and their daughters, Martha, five, and Anna, three.

First day of school: Jeremy Vine, pictured in Surrey, outside his childhood home

First day of school: Jeremy Vine, pictured in his school uniform, outside his childhood home in Cheam

When this photo was taken, I was probably five. It must have been for my first day at Lynton Preparatory School in Ewell, Surrey, because, in those days, my parents would only have photographed special occasions. I was really excited, and I think I'd just learnt to stand on one leg... maybe to show that I didn't need any further education.

I'm standing outside my then home in Northey Avenue, Cheam. Behind me is a letterbox, which made ours the most convenient house ever for posting things. I recently went to see this house again for the first time in around 35 years with my family, who still live in the area.

We knocked on the door and the people who live there now kindly let us in. They have more kit than we had when I was a kid - we just had a tiny black and white television.

My parents never had much money, but they spent what they had on educating me and my younger siblings, Tim and Sonya.

I don't know why they sent Tim and me to Lynton - maybe because they heard it was a nice place and liked the headmist ress, Mrs Thorns. In those days, there was no competitive parenting or academic league tables. I certainly didn't appreciate how lucky I was to go to a school like that.

My memories of Lynton are hazy. Our blazers bore badges with the letters LPS - someone put round that this stood for Liver and Pork Sausages, and we all believed that. I don't know what the shorts were made from but they made our legs itch. For the first year at least I was forever scratching my thighs.

Jeremy Vine

Jeremy lives now in London, but wonders if he should be moving to the countryside with his wife and two children

I can't remember what happened in the classrooms, except a very old lady saying the word 'chien' a lot at us, so I learnt the French word for dog very early. I should have been good at maths because my dad teaches it, but then I just found it baffling.

I loved drawing and painting, which didn't seem like work at all.

A few of the other kids wore glasses and I reckoned that's what you wore when you were cool.

So I fibbed to my mum that I couldn't see the blackboard properly, and she took me to the optician where I claimed not to be able to read the letters. I was prescribed NHS glasses with lenses that were totally wrong when I didn't need any at all.

Then I really couldn't see the blackboard, and I'd return home with headaches and Mum started to wor ry that I'd got a brain tumour. It all got a bit out of hand and I ended up going without glasses for the next 15 years, until I genuinely did need them.

I remember everyone in the playground was a supporter of Leeds United - the team's glory years were in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I felt isolated by that because I wasn't sporty, which is often a big dividing line in schools like this. Kids played hard anyway, then, and there was a certain amount of argy-bargy in that playground.

You'd think there wouldn't have been much trouble in suburban Surrey in the 1970s, but... One day a particularly rebellious boy, who was always getting into scrapes, had his toe run over by a car. It didn't hurt him, but it was the most dramatic thing I'd known up to that point in my life.

As a young child, I was a little too sensitive and selfish. I probably had all the slightly annoying characteristics of a first child - having been too lavishly attended to and completely believing that the world would not revolve unless you were in it. The second and third children don't have that.

My brother, Tim - who's now a well-known comedian - was always more popular at school than me, but then he was more sporty and gregarious. Friends I made for life were at university, whereas Tim's were made in the playground.

Tim is two years my junior, but we both went from Lynton to Aberdour School in Burgh Heath at the age of seven, and then, at 13, on to Epsom College. I've since been invited back to Aberdour and Epsom, but I never returned to Lynton, and I gather it closed down in 2001.

Now I live in west London, I have perpetual thoughts of 'Should we be moving to the countryside?' I've got two little kids who hardly know what a sheep looks like, although my in-laws live in Devon and we go there a lot.

The halfway house is where I was as a kid, with a big back garden and a local park and shops nearby. Yet, somehow, I still can't see myself returning to suburbia.

Jeremy Vine presents the lunchtime show on Radio 2, every weekday at noon.

Jeremy Vine: Me and my school photo


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